Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Read online

  “No, man, don’t say that.”

  “Out out out on my ass, bump bump down the stairs, dig?”

  Lord, Fitzgore, didn’t see him. Four others, no three, that horn-rim type, where? Pimples. Oh Jesus, the D.U. dinner, flee.

  “Old-timey Agnoo here’s buying up the Red Cap supply, man, kind of cornered the market, you know? Have a little Red Cap, veal scallopine, you hungry? You know everybody atta table? You know the Lumpers chic here, you know Agnoo, you ‘member Rosenbloom an’ friend from the wheel?”

  “Agneau,” came the nervous correction, an uneasy, bespectacled glance at Gnossos, pinching motion to the knot of his tie. No cool. Fitzgore glaring, being too quiet, Condition Red, man. Christ, the dubbies on Lumpers.

  “My name is Juan Carlos Rosenbloom,” said the one in a sequined rodeo shirt. “From Maracaibo.” He strained formally over the red plastic tabletop, stretching out a minuscule, hairy hand. Not more than five feet tall, Saint Christopher medal tight on his throat, grease mat for a head. All I need. “An’ my freng Drew Youngblood, the editors of the Sun.”

  “We weren’t introduced that night,” said the editor.

  “What night, man?”

  “The roulettes,” explained Rosenbloom, spinning his tiny finger around the table to mimic a wheel. Yes, of course. Want their bread back? May have to bust noses.

  “The appeal failed, y’know,” from Jack, her hand going up and down on the inside of Heff’s bluejeaned thigh, a third of her attention on the Lumpers breasts. Fitzgore too quiet.

  “I will buy you something to drink,” said Rosenbloom, signaling for the waitress.

  “Wha’d you like?” asked Youngblood.

  Gnossos shrugging his shoulders, lush not exactly right for the time, pointing to his head for Heff’s benefit, who saw and understood the reference but made a blubbering sound with his lips just the same. Lumpers sliding over. Ought to flee, really, use tact. Lobes still not straight, waitress looking at me. Ahem. “You have any Metaxa?”

  “I can’t unnerstan’ you.” A blob of gum in her jaw.

  “It’s Greek.”

  “It’s what?”

  Control. “Rye, then. Any kind of rye. Four Roses even, and a little ginger ale.”

  “I’ll see ‘fthey got any. You have a draft card?”

  “Look, baby—”

  “Jus’ answer the question. Y’ never know who’s gonna be checkin’ up. Y’ want Guido t’lose his license?”

  Do the Gandhi. “Yes, I’ve got one. You’d like to see it?”

  “No, as long as you got it. Why don’t you make life simple, have a beer?” Going away. Fat legs. I’ll have her mutilated, so help me . . .

  “My round,” said Youngblood, still serious in expression.

  “No, plis,” from the South American, flashing a twenty, “I’m insist.”

  “Hey, Paps,” said Heffalump, putting down the fifth martini glass, empty, “I want it verified who was Tonto’s horse. Old Jack here, she says Scout, and Fitz says Tony.”

  “My God,” said Lumpers, in angora, “I used to listen to that on the radio. Every Sunday afternoon.”

  “Get ’em up, Scout,” said Jack, sadly. Her free hand extending from a man’s blue buttondown Oxford shirt, fingers drumming hoofbeats on the table.

  “I was hoping I’d catch up with you again,” said Youngblood intimately, motioning Rosenbloom’s twenty into obscurity and struggling to get his own wallet free of his chinos, away from the press of bodies in the booth. “There’s this Susan B. Pankhurst thing I wanted to talk to you about, although you probably never heard of her.”

  “I’m insist,” continued Rosenbloom.

  “Really, it used to be on every Sunday afternoon, the Lone Ranger and Tonto,” Lumpers’ attention given to Heff, who was trying to contain all his martini olives under a single inverted glass. “Although sometimes we called him the Long Ranger, he he ha.”

  “Susan what?” Gnossos with his eye on the Lumpers dubbies.

  “It couldn’t’ve been Sundays,” said Jack, stopping her finger-drumming, licking her Red Cap. “It was Thursdays, brought to you by Cheerios. And Tony was Tom Mix’s horse, anyway.”

  “B. Pankhurst. A new Vice-President for Student Affairs. She’s putting through a bill about coeds in apartments.”

  “Sundays was Nick and Nora Charles,” said Heff, not looking up from his project, “with that crazy dog they had. What the hell was that dog?”

  “Do you realize I’m being fined TEN DOLLARS for that dinner, you maniac?!” yelled Fitzgore, lurching over suddenly, shoving his carrot-colored hair away from his eyes. “Ten goddamned bills?!”

  Pretend you can’t hear him. Lost his mind. What to do? Return the enema bag.

  Gnossos reaching into his rucksack and handing over the rubber bag and tube while looking casually for the waitress. Highball, the near-perfect drink, la la. Defines social status. “Heff—excuse me a minute, would you, Youngblood?—they didn’t truly throw you out, did they?”

  “An’ the House of Mystery, that was Sundays too.”

  “And Sky King,” said the Lumpers girl with delight, shifting weight, nudging Gnossos accidentally with her left breast.

  “Sky King was Saturdays,” from Heff. “With Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders. And you bet your rosy buns they threw me out, man.”

  “Look, Gnossos,” insisted the editor of the Sun. “We have to talk over this Pankhurst thing, if you follow me. I mean, what she’s after is to keep unchaperoned coeds out of apartments.”

  “In Maracaibo we have chaperones, ha ha.” Rosenbloom giving up the twenty to a sequined shirt pocket and fingering his Saint Christopher absently.

  “Listen,” Agneau was whispering to a broiling Fitzgore. “Don’t get excited. Why get excited, really?”

  “I don’t mind the ten bills, it’s only this embarrassing a whole damn house for a lousy T-bone steak, or whatever the hell it was. Who wasn’t embarrassed, for instance? Tell me you weren’t embarrassed?”

  “Who?” continued Heff, ignoring them, “was the Green Hornet’s faithful Filipino companion?”

  “Kato,” answered Gnossos casually, taking his highball from the passing waitress. “Who by the way was a Jap to begin with, but they had to cool it after the heat at Pearl Harbor.”

  “Check. And Hop Harrigan’s ace buddy?”

  “Oh. Hop Harrigan.”

  “Tank Tinker,” from Gnossos, sipping.

  “Listen,” insisted Youngblood. “You don’t realize that if she gets this chaperone thing through, you won’t be able to have women in your apartments!”

  A subtle collective pause in everyone’s breathing. “I beg your pardon?” asked Gnossos and Fitzgore, almost simultaneously.

  Another pause.

  “No women.” Youngblood leaning back.

  “Townies, even?” Agneau twisting his cuticle-free pinky, smiling falsely at the two coeds, who froze him right out.

  “She said,” continued Youngblood, sensing his time, “this Pankhurst actually said that male apartments, if you follow me, are conducive . . . to petting and intercourse.”

  Silence.

  “She’s only doing her duty,” from Heff, pulling himself up, “as God gave her the right.”

  “To do her duty,” added Jack.

  “Who sponsored Jack Armstrong?” asked Heff.

  “Wheaties,” said Gnossos. “She’s down on humping, is she?”

  “Intercourse,” corrected Fitzgore in despair, “for goddamn Christ’s sake.”

  “An’ who was responsible for bringing you Captain Midnight?” asked Heff.

  “Ovaltine, man. Now if you could get her to come out and say it again—”

  “Don’ bother leetle things,” said Rosenbloom. “Have a revolutiong. Smash her, how you call her, Panghurts.”

  “Somebody’s getting involved,” warned Heffalump slyly, across all the jumbled conversation. “Somebody better be careful, he gets himself infuckingvolved.”

&n
bsp; True. Proceed with caution: “What’s the ploy, man?”

  “You had it figured. We want her to say it again. In public this time.”

  “Have a revolutiong,” said Rosenbloom.

  “Only we’re not certain how to go about it.” Pausing, leaning forward. “We thought you might have something in mind.”

  Gnossos looking around the table. “Me?”

  “Captain Midnight’s archenemy?” Heff winking.

  “Ivan Shark,” said Jack, her hands on the table now, most of her attention on the Lumpers breasts.

  “What, are you serious; me, man?”

  “If she said it all publicly, this petting and intercourse thing, maybe we could do something. The issue would be moral. I mean, she’d be opposing P and I as entities, as concepts having nothing to do with Lairville apartments. We could take her on. There’s even talk about her becoming Mentor President, but that’s too horrible a prospect to consider just now.”

  “Smash her,” said Rosenbloom.

  Gnossos looked at Youngblood. He was wearing a plain white Arrow shirt, no buttons on the collar, open at the throat, and even had an honest face.

  “That’s your plan, then, you want to take her on?”

  Youngblood leaning in closer, lowering his voice and looking at the table: “We want the President.”

  “Kill him,” said Rosenbloom.

  “Don’t get involved, Paps.”

  “Listen,” said Judy Lumpers, turning away from Jack’s gaze, “I’m a government major and I know that it doesn’t really have very much to do with what you’re talking about, I mean God, but if you want the President out, that can be extremely tedious. Not to say difficult.”

  “We gotta get back to the dorms,” said Jack, looking at the clock. “You going to Jove, Lumpers?”

  “I mean, the President, really.”

  “Some other time, man,” said Gnossos, rising, gulping the last of the highball. “But later. Up, old Heffalump, I want words with you. Got a little mission to accomplish.”

  “Who designed the Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph?” from Heff, struggling to his feet. All through Guido’s a shift in movement, in inflection, as the Coed Curfew Hour became apparent.

  “C’mon, Lumpers baby,” said Jack, “we’ll be late.”

  “I can drive you back,” from Fitzgore.

  “Nobody’s paying any attention to me,” said Heff, reeling slightly as he stood. “Who designed—”

  “Ichabod Mudd,” said Gnossos, reaching casually into his rucksack and producing a small rusted device with letters and numbers on its side. Everyone stopped talking and stared at the object with stunned admiration.

  “A Code-O-Graph,” said Heffalump, after some awed moments. “A Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph!”

  All of Guido’s collapsed into total silence as every head in the place, including the waitress’s, turned to gaze reverently at the artifact, which Gnossos fingered proudly, then elevated like a communion wafer so tribute might be offered. They all remembered.

  In the marble vestibule of Anagram Hall, deserted except for the echo of their hoarse whispers, Heffalump and Gnossos crept along on hands and knees.

  “What the hell are you doing, you madman? Where’d you get that ball-peen hammer?”

  “From Blacknesse’s car. And shut up, there might be a watchman. There’ll be enough noise in a minute.”

  “Jesus Christ, Paps.”

  They inched away from the vestibule, along the main corridor, Gnossos lighting matches and checking office numbers, the glow giving eerie definition to the white busts which stood against the wall.

  “Here, this looks right.”

  “Where?”

  “Shhh.”

  He kneeled and examined the lock, dipping into his rucksack for a long nailfile, which he inserted in the keyhole. Feels like a single tumbler. Too far in. Back a ways. No. No good. “You have your knife, Heff?”

  “Shit, man,” feeling the pockets of his jeans, fumbling, then handing it over.

  Gnossos pulled out the awl and inserted it as he had the nailfile. Much better. Left, I imagine. There. The tumbler turned over with an audible clack and he twisted the brass handle quickly, motioning Heffalump inside. He closed the door behind them and for a moment they stood silently on the carpeted floor. Easy as that.

  “Well, here we are.”

  “Shit, Paps.”

  “Stay loose, man. The cat kicked you out, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He hit me for five, right?”

  “Right.”

  They crawled across the office, ducking under windows, Gnossos lighting two more matches on the way, finally stopping before a large glass cabinet.

  Open, he ho. The sweet saliva of retribution.

  He lifted out each of Dean Magnolia’s mineralogical specimens, crystal, shale, semiprecious quartz, igneous delights, and laid them all on the rug in the shape of an equilateral triangle.

  “What the hell are all those things, Paps?”

  “A whole lot of doodley-shit,” from Gnossos, bringing the hammer down ferociously on the first of the stones, smashing it violently into dust and sand.

  5

  March came fumbling in like the Wizard of Oz lion, winds shifting the surge of their northern force, padding around the horizon, creeping further and further west as the still invisible sun climbed nearer the zenith each day, warmed the gorge-crawling clouds, and loosened the first of the spring rain.

  On this damp and leaden morning Gnossos sat in his narrow bed by the recently installed, hermetically sealed window, legs crossed under the monster eiderdown, scanning the editorial page of the Mentor Daily Sun. The paper had appeared, as usual, after mysterious, delicate rapping. Whenever it happened, he would tiptoe over the Navajo rug, wait a moment—his fingers poised on Fitzgore’s pewter latch—then pull the door open, hoping to surprise Jimmy Brown the Newsboy or the yawning little toddler from the Fisk tire ads, candle in hand, tire slung over his shoulder. But always there was no one there. The hallway, the front steps, the avenue beyond were empty. On the odd wide-awake mornings, when his brain was clear, or dawns following all-night sessions with polar co-ordinates, he would crouch against the door, with a hard-boiled breakfast egg in hand, waiting for footsteps, ready for the rapping. But when he waited, the paper never came.

  Now he kept his place with a middle finger while glancing through the two-ply glass in the window to see if the rain had stopped. He grunted and continued reading. Fitzgore was snoring on the other bed, perpendicular to the wall at the foot of his own. The apartment looked much the way it had when he’d seen it that first afternoon, with the single, pub-emulating exception of Fitzgore’s pewter, copper hunting horns, and hammered brass plates. The rice-paper globe had been lowered so that it hung not three feet from the floor over a circular piece of black plywood, which rested insecurely on a cinder block from the construction site at Larghetto Lodge. The globe advertised a single, complex Chinese ideogram, inked by Gnossos’ trembling hand while he waited one evening for Beth Blacknesse to fill a paregoric prescription. The character signified that the rucksack was holy and the rucksack was not for sale. Harold Wong, coxy on the Olympic crew, had done the translation.

  There were marks on the wall from strips of masking tape, where he’d torn away the landlord’s quaintly familiar Degas, Renoir, Soyer, Utrillo, and Mary Cassatt prints in a narcotized rage. A nail had been driven into the French doors that separated him from the alcoholic Rajamuttus, and on it was hung the rucksack. It emanated a faint odor of month-old rabbits’ feet and Oriental goods from the Greco-Turkish supply company in the Negro section downtown. Two rubber plants stood by the fireplace, still in the dappled, plastic pots he’d meant to disguise with flat-black spray. And spilled textbooks everywhere, notes scrawled in the margins, faces drawn on the covers. All horizontal surfaces were occupied by at least one open beercan stuffed with cigarettes saturated in some reeking liquid. And dominating the entire white-walled li
ving room, hanging over the mantel by the number-fifteen housewire anchored to the molding, was the tapestrylike Blacknesse painting of the man cutting away his own head.

  Before turning to the editorials, Gnossos had finished the rear-page release on the demolished stones. Vandalism, read the headline. Still No Leads on Smashed Magnolia Specimens. The subhead told how Proctor Slug Suspects Drunken Prank, Discounts Psychological Motive. Oh la. In the body of the story there were vague references to the last incident of its kind, the disappearance of imported Italian statues from the Christmas crèche at Hector Ramrod Hall, the amazing springtime recovery of the Virgin Mary’s head, found intact by bathing coeds in Harpy Creek gorge. A miracle.

  There came quick, clattering jangles. Gnossos sprang from the bed, pounced on the vibrating alarm clock next to Fitzgore’s ear, muffled the sound, found the switch, then shuffled back to bed. Fitzgore tossing only slightly, altering the pitch of his snore, failing to wake.

  Wrapped again in the eiderdown (a gift from Pamela Watson-May), knees against his chest, munching on a chunk of dried-up feta, sipping at the last of the Schweppes she had also left behind, he continued the editorial by Drew Youngblood, a public warning to faculty and students that Susan B. Pankhurst

  was merely one personified facet of a cleverly conceived plan on the part of the present administration to shift the responsibility of certain highly significant student affairs into the hands of Minotaur Hall. In addition to the already proposed, and highly speculative, ruling on coeds and Lairville apartments—a ruling certainly improbable, had the faculty committee not been dissolved by the President at the end of its tenure—there has occurred yesterday’s failure to reappoint the Architectural Advisory Committee, an extremely eminent authority, whose permission and advice have hitherto been mandatory before construction or demolition of new campus buildings could commence.

  Crusades, thought Gnossos. Jehads and holy wars. Youngblood with that unlikely combination of honest expressions folded in his face like stiff-peaked egg whites in a batter. Truthsayer, his white shirt without a buttondown collar, no tie. Sew a cross of Saint George on his back, tie a maiden’s scarf in his sash, point him at the Tigris and Euphrates. It’s somewhere out there, lad, in the hands of the pagan Turks. I know we can count on you.